When Adventure Designers Cheat

[Celebrim]

Good of you to point that out.
Gygax, inventor of DnD, often violated his own rules for a sort of effect that I call Nener-nener. I.e. You think your cool power should stop this, but I've written something even more super cool that makes your cool power lame and stupid.
Now jump through this hoop, or your character dies.

Why do you persist in thinking the worst of people? Gygax violated his own rules because he didn't want to be hidebound to the rules, and being in large part his rules, who had better right to violate them. But even that doesn't express the whole of the truth.

Gygax created exceptions to the norm for the same reason every good 1st edition DM created exceptions to the norm, because in 1st edition D&D after about 12th level or so (and to a certain extent, as soon as 9th), it became near impossible to challenge a group of skilled players. There wasn't really a thing in the monster manual that a party of about 12th level or so couldn't handle. Monsters didn't scale up to infinite levels like in third. Even the elder gods only had 400 hitpoints. By level 15 or so, things had to get down right epic and by 15th level believe me you'd been playing ALOT of AD&D in order to get that far (you could probably play through three or four entire 3rd edition adventure paths in the time it would take you to get 1st edition characters to 10th level.) By that time, it takes abit of rule bending just to keep players on thier toes. By that time, taking away the usual crutches was less like playing 'neener neener' and more like forcing the players to think outside of the normal problem solving rut that they'd gotten into. Taking away a few of the magical crutches made high level D&D play more like the old AD&D sweet spot of 3rd to 8th level.

It was, for a group who came by thier high level parties honestly, in a certain since highly refreshing - if elevating the tension of the game can be called refreshing and I think it can.

i don't really think that the sort of game play passes muster anymore.

Try it. I think you'd be surprised what passes muster. There is a thread going on right now where a bunch of players, almost certainly not 1st edition grognards, enamored with the roleplaying, economic, and political possibilities of - get this - adventuring parties going out into the wilds and borderlands on behalf of a leige lord and carving out thier fiefdoms - as if this was some new and original idea they'd never considered. You can't get more old school than that. I had to smile at the moment that the ridiculous idea of cleaning out a stronghold and making it thier base of operations suddenly stopped seeming quite so ridiculous. Everything "old skool" can and will be new again.

As for RttoEE... I've heard mixed reviews about it and never played it.

Which makes you qualified to judge it how?

MC's a very creative person, but, he does love to periodically nuke PCs powers and/or write impossible dungeons a bit too frequently. (I think one of his published adventures in 2nd ed. wasn’t solvable without errata; parts of the Banewarrens also did this).

When he DM's them, they seem to work out pretty well. Monte is a bit too revel in the old school hack and slash for my taste, but I've every respect for how well he does what he does.

He's also posted a lot of articles saying it's a bad thing to negate character’s powers.

In general, I'd agree. It's very easy to over do, but there are times when you want to - need to - write, "The Wonderous Widget of Extreme Signifigance is immune to any attack short of divine wrath." or "The Iron Box of Baba Yaga cannot be opened or penetrated by any means except by the finger bone in room 23b." If it makes you feel better, you can write, "The Wonderous Widget of Extreme Significance has hardness 80, SR 80, 400 hit points, etc. etc.", but that's the same thing with more words and numbers. Why waste space?

Which does he mean?

When a budding writer is told, "Avoid the passive voice. Show, don't tell. Don't end a sentence with a preposition. Don't use sentence fragments. Avoid run on sentences. Don't begin your story with, "It was a dark and stormy night..."", and so forth, the writer is being given good advice. But when Faulkner, Poe, Hemingway, Shakespeare, or some such break the rules, they generally have a good reason for doing so.

Where does this special, non-magical, non-corporeal, cold creature live?

Since you insist on an answer, on the prime. Nothing prevents a non-corporeal energy creature from existing on the prime. Nothing prevents a creature from being unseen, but not being invisible. 'See Invisible' doesn't let a player see the air, or things to small to see, or heat, or the absence of it.

I do think that this sort of if-I-say-something-random-that-totally-violates-the-game-rules-it’s-ok-because-I’m-the-design-writer-and-I-want-to-do-it is an example of weak design.

You have a bizarre notion of what violates the rules. Unless something is specifically forbidden by the rules, it is permitted (and certainly permitted to the DM). Do you insist that air violates the rules? Its unseen. It's not ethereal. It's not however 'invisible'. It can, as everything else in the D&D universe, including nothing (see vacuum para-elemental) be alive. Yet it doesn't require the invention of a new parallel plane to contain it, and even if it did, nothing in the rules prevents a DM from inventing new parallel planes. It's not up to the player to tell the DM how the cosmos works, and the DM is under no obligation to explain to the player how the cosmos works unless the character has sufficient knowledge and experience to understand it.

You do realize that every single thing in the game, every single rule, every single cosmological feature, every single creature, every standard and conventional thing in the game was at some point the completely new and original and often unprecedented invention of some DM?

 

[Hussar]

But in any event, even if they were magical, having them not radiate magic is not outside the rules. Everyone knows that one of the signs of powerful divine artifact level magic is that it is not detected by ordinary means. That's been true in D&D since the very beginning. If the robes are the magical creation of a deity, there is no reason why they have to radiate magic even if they were magical (which I've no reason to believe that they are)

**Raises hand**

Umm, I'm part of everybody, I think, but, I had no idea that divine artifacts don't radiate magic. AFAIK, you go blind when looking at them through detect magic. Color me confused.

ygax created exceptions to the norm for the same reason every good 1st edition DM created exceptions to the norm, because in 1st edition D&D after about 12th level or so (and to a certain extent, as soon as 9th), it became near impossible to challenge a group of skilled players. There wasn't really a thing in the monster manual that a party of about 12th level or so couldn't handle. Monsters didn't scale up to infinite levels like in third.

Then, wouldn't the answer have been to rewrite some of the rules, rather than simply fudging and moving on?

Even the elder gods only had 400 hitpoints. By level 15 or so, things had to get down right epic and by 15th level believe me you'd been playing ALOT of AD&D in order to get that far (you could probably play through three or four entire 3rd edition adventure paths in the time it would take you to get 1st edition characters to 10th level.) By that time, it takes abit of rule bending just to keep players on thier toes. By that time, taking away the usual crutches was less like playing 'neener neener' and more like forcing the players to think outside of the normal problem solving rut that they'd gotten into. Taking away a few of the magical crutches made high level D&D play more like the old AD&D sweet spot of 3rd to 8th level.

This is patently untrue. There are threads on here showing how much xp you get from various modules in 1e and in 3e. Up to about 10th level, both advance at almost exactly the same rate. The idea that 1e took so long to advance is a myth unless you stripped out the xp for gold rule. The amount of treasure in those old modules meant that you advanced very, very rapidly.

 

[VirgilCaine]

I'm talking about this:

That's why I ask why would you bother to give them food then?

I think you might be confused. Or maybe you were agreeing with me? I'm lost here.

The adventure I was talking about is not a "good" D&D adventure. It negates the PCs abilities and requires the players to think through a mystery. Thinking isn't a bad thing, I love to see it.
But I think the rules should be used to further the adventure and not ignored. If your abilities are negated all the time, what's the point of leveling up?

 

[Celebrim]

Umm, I'm part of everybody, I think, but, I had no idea that divine artifacts don't radiate magic. AFAIK, you go blind when looking at them through detect magic. Color me confused.

In first edition, major artifacts had the property of not radiating magic unless otherwise specified. If this has changed, I must have overlooked it. (Ever heard of the legendary Head of Vecna? Great story.) In any event, even if it has changed there is no rule that says a major artifact must radiate magic, since by definition what makes it an artifact is that it breaks the normal expectations of how things work.

Then, wouldn't the answer have been to rewrite some of the rules, rather than simply fudging and moving on?

And what makes you think he was fudging and not 'rewriting' the rules? Things like the fact that spells worked differently on planes other than the prime, magic items were reduced in 'pluses' when brought to the outer planes, and clerics lost access to high level spells when on an outer plane other than thier dieties home plane became standard parts of D&D lore when Gygax 'revealed' that thats how things worked.

What I find most annoying about all this talk of 'DM's cheating' is most of the things you and the others are complaining about aren't DM's breaking rules. They are DM's doing things that don't match your expectations. As an example, there is no rule that says an object can't be unbreakable, and there are in fact obvious examples of objects which aren't breakable. So if a DM wants to have an unbreakable door, he's not 'cheating'. He might not be a good DM and there might not be a good in game reason for such a door and it might or might not be a better module without an unbreakable door, but he's well within his rights to have one.

When you start claiming, "The DM is cheating because he's ruled the door is unbreakable.", what you are really saying - or at least what I as a DM am hearing - is, "My expectation is that doors should be breakable, that's how I always solve the problem of doors I can't open, and if I'm not allowed to solve the problem that way then I'm going to fall back to solving the problem through metagaming like rules lawyering, whining, or acting like an @$$".

I wonder how many of you complaining about the DM 'cheating' would be complaining at all if the DM's same fiat ruling benifited the player. For example, what if the DM informed the player that his new Sword of Nifty Slaugtering was unbreakable and hense immune to sundering and any other form of damage? Would that also be 'cheating'? Would that be equally as 'uninteresting' as an unbreakable door?

This is patently untrue. There are threads on here showing how much xp you get from various modules in 1e and in 3e. Up to about 10th level, both advance at almost exactly the same rate. The idea that 1e took so long to advance is a myth unless you stripped out the xp for gold rule. The amount of treasure in those old modules meant that you advanced very, very rapidly.

So, the fact that I played 1st edition for 14 years doesn't enter into this equation? Sheesh. I'm supposed to balance 14 years of AD&D experience against some guys theoretical calculation of how fast you leveled up based on his work with a sample of 1st edition modules? Yeah, that's going to convince me. "Don't believe your own 14 years of personal experience, I read on this thread how if you plug numbers into this formula some guy came up with how your personal experiences are just a myth."

 

[GQuail]

In first edition, major artifacts had the property of not radiating magic unless otherwise specified. If this has changed, I must have overlooked it. (Ever heard of the legendary Head of Vecna? Great story.) In any event, even if it has changed there is no rule that says a major artifact must radiate magic, since by definition what makes it an artifact is that it breaks the normal expectations of how things work.

I checked my 1E PHB & DMG and could find no utterance of such a rule: do you know where it's mentioned?

In 3.X, the DMG specifically lists the caster level and aura type of all minor artifacts, and as I recall Detect Magic explicitly calls out the type of aura of an artifact in the top level of magic item aura types. In my own 3.X game, the recent arrival of an Orb of Dragonkind and part of the Regalia of Evil was reinforced by it's uber aura, a clear sign that it was above the items the rest of the party have found. (Though of course, spells to obscure such a thing are easilly arranged for the DM who wants to do things this way, and as you say artifacts can break the rules by their nature)

When you start claiming, "The DM is cheating because he's ruled the door is unbreakable.", what you are really saying - or at least what I as a DM am hearing - is, "My expectation is that doors should be breakable, that's how I always solve the problem of doors I can't open, and if I'm not allowed to solve the problem that way then I'm going to fall back to solving the problem through metagaming like rules lawyering, whining, or acting like an @$$".

As a DM myself, I think you're being a bit unfair on him. I think some of the vital difference that's coming up in this thread is "unbreakable, full stop" versus "so hard to break you can't manage it in time". A magically reinforced door might have X hardness and Y hit points so the party, with the weapons and spells they have, can't crack it: but in theory, it's doable. But an adventure which just says "nothing will crack this door" is cutting off that avenue completely. Worse still, if the party return to the site again a few levels later, none of their increased powers help: but if the quantified door slams down on the party, then they get the satisfaction of breezeing through it this time, a quantification of their progress.

You accuse him of seeing the situation as "the solution I want to use is unviable, so I'm going to be a pest": but ironically, the adventure designer could be accused of the inverse. The kind of problem that only has one solution (like the previously listed "jump into the flames" example) is no fun to some players because they enjoy the flexibility of the problem solving aspect of D&D, and artificially limiting them with unbreakable doors stops them doing that.

Remember, we're talking here about pre-made adventures - I think it's one thing for me to scribble in my notes "the party can't break the door down", but it's another to sell an adventure with no alternative whatsoever for anything other than The Solution. On the contrary, most guides to adventure and encounter design often mention the importance of having different ways to bypass obstacles and progress plots as an important part of crafting popular adventures: if civvies like me can put effort into that, I would rather the pros did as well. ;-)

Of course, you may like these adventures, and that's fine: I will confess that the Tomb of Horrors is still a laugh for even me. ;-) I just don't think it's fair to imply that the only reason to call something cheating is because they're bad players is fair, because sometimes the blame has to land on the DM or adventure writer.

I wonder how many of you complaining about the DM 'cheating' would be complaining at all if the DM's same fiat ruling benifited the player. For example, what if the DM informed the player that his new Sword of Nifty Slaugtering was unbreakable and hense immune to sundering and any other form of damage? Would that also be 'cheating'? Would that be equally as 'uninteresting' as an unbreakable door?

That's a different question, because unless odd situations come to pass, the unbreakable door will not obstruct the players progress. The gist of the OPs complaint way back on page one, as I understood it, was that a problem in an adventure could only be passed by one route and actively bypassed normal solutions. A sword which is unbreakable also breaks the lack of absolutes, but it's unlikely to hinder or kill PCs: the unbreakable door in the trapped room might be the last thing some characters see, and could leave a foul taste in some peoples mouths.

Plenty of GMs fudge a dice roll from time to time, or insert items or powers that don't quite fit mechanics for whatever reason. Anyone who homebrews a monster, spell or whatever is arguably doing the same thing as we're talking about here: inventing something new rather than use the core rules. The difference is motivation, and I would argue that the motivation for making an unbreakable door or room with magic elemental energy that can only be resisted by one item that's only in another part of the dungeon is most likely railroading, or at least will end up feeling like that to players who find their cold resistance or metal melting spells don't work this time because, and, that's why.

Of course, most of the above is all objective playstyle stuff, so at the end of the day, who cares? If you like more Gygaxian "cheating" adventures, then go for it, and I'm sure there's hordes of players who would laugh off the death of another character to a fiendish trap whilst the surviving characters vowed revenge. But I don't think it's a good thing for published adventures to be running with, especialy in D20 when there are so many guidelines to building most things.

 

[Celebrim]

I checked my 1E PHB & DMG and could find no utterance of such a rule: do you know where it's mentioned?

I don't have my books with me, but I seem to recall it in the section on artifacts. However, even if I'm wrong it doesn't effect my larger point. I was merely providing one of the many possible explanations for why the cloaks worked by wouldn't be detected as magic. I can provide others, for example that the cold effect is triggered in much the same way that magic mouths are triggered. Thus, it doesn't matter that the cloaks aren't magical, they protect because the magical 'trap' doesn't go off except when approached by beings not wearing the appropriate regalia.

As a DM myself, I think you're being a bit unfair on him. I think some of the vital difference that's coming up in this thread is "unbreakable, full stop" versus "so hard to break you can't manage it in time". A magically reinforced door might have X hardness and Y hit points so the party, with the weapons and spells they have, can't crack it: but in theory, it's doable. But an adventure which just says "nothing will crack this door" is cutting off that avenue completely.

Which is precisely the point. Sometimes its perfectly appropriate to cut off a path completely. A magically reinforced door with X hardness and Y hit points can always be busted down, unless you set an arbitrarly high hardness in which case you've effectively said the same thing. But suppose the DM is tired of characters falling back on the unimaginative answer of just bashing the doors down. Then he's well in his rights to make the door unbashable. Doors which can't be bashed down are stock puzzles in every type of RPG from pen and paper to computer games, precisely because sometimes you want getting through the door to be a bit more questlike than just coming up to it with a hammer and bashing it to bits.

Sometimes figuring out how to open the door should be a challenge.

Worse still, if the party return to the site again a few levels later, none of their increased powers help: but if the quantified door slams down on the party, then they get the satisfaction of breezeing through it this time, a quantification of their progress.

You don't know that. The door could be opened by the application of a successful dispel magic which dispels its magical lock (or its magical fortification), by a cleric expending a turn check, by a few more ranks of open lock, by a specifically mentioned vunerability (for example, Holy Word, Disentigrate, etc.), or it could be bypassed by etherealness, or by going into gaseous form, or a clue to how to open it could be discovered through appropriate divination, or by the Bard recalling a snippet of ancient lore in the form of a riddle - all of which are alternative paths which will become easier as the characters advance in level. Perhaps its the DM's intention to leave that mysterious unopenable door thier for several sessions, thus to increase the drama and intrigue and hense the delight when the door is finally opened.

You accuse him of seeing the situation as "the solution I want to use is unviable, so I'm going to be a pest": but ironically, the adventure designer could be accused of the inverse.

Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on context.

The kind of problem that only has one solution (like the previously listed "jump into the flames" example) is no fun to some players because they enjoy the flexibility of the problem solving aspect of D&D, and artificially limiting them with unbreakable doors stops them doing that.

Oh, I completely agree that the 'jump into the flames' example was utterly ludicrous and some of the worst DMing that I've encountered. The only possible context in which that would make any sense is if there was a riddle prominently displayed before the room of death which hinted at the solution to the puzzle. (This is in fact half the plot of 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade'.)

But allow me to suggest a player that enjoys bashing down doors probably doesn't enjoy solving puzzles, and a player that gets upset because he isn't allowed to solve the puzzle by simply bashing down the door REALLY doesn't like solving puzzles.

Remember, we're talking here about pre-made adventures - I think it's one thing for me to scribble in my notes "the party can't break the door down", but it's another to sell an adventure with no alternative whatsoever for anything other than The Solution.

Quite the contrary. The fundamental limitation of publishes adventures is limited space. There isn't room for lengthy listing of all the possibilities. You can either choose to list a few approved methods, or list a few disapproved methods. But you don't have space to deal with all the possibilities. The assumption is that the DM will feel in the details appropriately.

On the contrary, most guides to adventure and encounter design often mention the importance of having different ways to bypass obstacles and progress plots as an important part of crafting popular adventures: if civvies like me can put effort into that, I would rather the pros did as well. ;-)

When you've fit a quality adventure into 32 pages minus illustrations and maps, you let me know how you feel.

I just don't think it's fair to imply that the only reason to call something cheating is because they're bad players is fair, because sometimes the blame has to land on the DM or adventure writer.

I didn't say that was the only reason. But I did say that in the case originally cited, the DM and adventure writers did a perfectly good job, and I said that in no case was the actual problem that made the adventure unfun what is in this thread being called 'cheating'. There might be bad design (like the aforementioned 'jump into the illusionary fire' trap), but it had nothing to do with what people are calling 'cheating'. In most cases, its simply being arbitrary and failing to provide appropriate context and clues. In the right context, the 'cheating' actually makes the adventure more fun. What fun would 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' be, if Indiana didn't have to get the clues in order to survive the deadly traps protecting the Grail?

That's a different question, because unless odd situations come to pass, the unbreakable door will not obstruct the players progress.

Irrelevant. Either 'cheating' is a problem or its not. If cheating is not a problem in a different situation, then you've conceded the point.

The gist of the OPs complaint way back on page one, as I understood it, was that a problem in an adventure could only be passed by one route and actively bypassed normal solutions.

So what.

A sword which is unbreakable also breaks the lack of absolutes, but it's unlikely to hinder or kill PCs:...

Then my point is proven. They aren't really whining about cheating. They are whining about the problem being 'too hard'. But while some problems might be unfair, the sited problems are most certainly not.

the unbreakable door in the trapped room might be the last thing some characters see, and could leave a foul taste in some peoples mouths.

Maybe. Maybe not. No one likes to die. You might as well complain about Dragon's though, which is often the last thing some characters see. Context is everything here.

The difference is motivation, and I would argue that the motivation for making an unbreakable door or room with magic elemental energy that can only be resisted by one item that's only in another part of the dungeon is most likely railroading, or at least will end up feeling like that to players who find their cold resistance or metal melting spells don't work this time because, and, that's why.

Railroading isn't always bad. It's just something that's very easy to overdo. But every adventure railroads to a certain extent.

 

[delericho]

Which is precisely the point. Sometimes its perfectly appropriate to cut off a path completely. A magically reinforced door with X hardness and Y hit points can always be busted down, unless you set an arbitrarly high hardness in which case you've effectively said the same thing.

There's a fundamental difference between saying "this door can never be bashed down" and saying "this door has X hardness and Y hit points", with X and Y set such that the PCs cannot at their level do enough damage to break down the door. In the latter case, the PCs can go and gain more levels, and increase their damage output, and at some later point reach a stage where they could break down the door, if they were so inclined. In the former case, they could not.

In fact, if the PCs adventured long enough that one of them attained godhood and became the deity of bashing doors (obviously, not one of the main deities in the setting... one would hope), that god still would not be able to bash down the first door. Which definately doesn't feel right.

The other problem with the "unbashable" door is that it hits problems as soon as you introduce "the sword that can cut through anything". Suddenly, you have two absolutes in opposition to one another, and have to figure out the way those two interact. If, instead, you apply the mechanisms supplied by the RAW, that issue never arises - the door has known properties, as does the sword, and the interaction between the two is obvious.

That said, if the DM wishes to introduce the unbashable door, that's his right. I won't complain in-game. If asked, I would advise against it, and afterwards I would probably provide feedback to the effect that such a device is sub-optimal adventure design, but it remains the DM's prerogative to do so.

If a professional adventure designer introduces the unbashable door, though, I'll be less than pleased. They're being paid to use the rules that are provided, not to ignore them.

 

[jdrakeh]

I don't think it's cheating. That said, I do think it's design work indicative of either laziness (i.e., the designer fails to learn the rules before he puts them to use) or control issues (i.e., the designer dislikes a given rule and thinks that his way should be The Way, and so ignores or omits offical rulings in things that he writes).

So far as examples go, I think that many early third-party d20 products demonstrated the former trend, while the proliferation of "instant death, no save allowed" encounters in AD&D 1e tends to do a good job of demonstrating the latter. And then, of course, you have the other, surprisingly common, instance of. . .

. . . disgruntled consumers mis-representing products. There's an old RPGnet review of the AD&D 2e adventure module The Apocalypse Stone that serves as a shining example of this misrepresentation. In said review, the module's designers are raked over the coals for using illusions to conceal the identities of certain good NPCs -- illusions that, according to the reviewer, can't be penetrated by True Seeing or other such magic.

The thing is, the "illusions" that the reviewer complains about aren't illusions at all. Spoilers follow. . .

Spoiler

The former inhabitants of Castle Peschour (sp?) aren't disguised with illusions -- they have physically been transformed into monsters (thus, why the True Seeing spell has no effect).

 

[delericho]

. . . disgruntled consumers mis-representing products. There's an old RPGnet review of the AD&D 2e adventure module The Apocalypse Stone that serves as a shining example of this misrepresentation. In said review, the module's designers are raked over the coals for using illusions to conceal the identities of certain good NPCs -- illusions that, according to the reviewer, can't be penetrated by True Seeing or other such magic.

The thing is, the "illusions" that the reviewer complains about aren't illusions at all. Spoilers follow. . .

Spoiler

The former inhabitants of Castle Peschour (sp?) aren't disguised with illusions -- they have physically been transformed into monsters (thus, why the True Seeing spell has no effect).

Uh, I've just checked the "Wizard's Spell Compendium", and according to it, True Seeing should apply in that situation.

 

[jdrakeh]

Uh, I've just checked the "Wizard's Spell Compendium", and according to it, True Seeing should apply in that situation.

Hmm. . . you're right (lets them see the true form of polymorphed, changed, or transmuted things). I seem to recall there being a good reason about why the reviewer was wrong about the adventure so far as True Seeing was concerned, athough I was apparently mistaken about what that reason was (it's been more than six years since I've seen an AD&D 2e rule book).